Currently, there are many kinds of computer mouse available on the market, which are the most popular human-machine interface used by computers as cursor-control device. There are three basic types of mice, which are mechanical mouse, LED optical mouse and laser mouse with respect to the different means of detection. However, since the aforesaid mice are constrained to use on a working surface that the condition of the working surface will have great influence upon the detection of the aforesaid mice as it will affect the ball rolling of the mechanical mouse and the shadow generating of the two optical mice, they can no longer meet the requirements of today's video games and multimedia applications, which desire to have an cursor-control device capable operated on a planar surface and in the air. As for the presentation device, it is usually a remote control device capable of enabling a lecturer to cycle through transparencies as it is designed with press-keys and relating circuits for controlling operations such as turning on/off, scrolling up/down and page forwarding/backwarding, etc. Nevertheless, as more and more people like to give his/her presentation by the use of his/her personal computer, it is more and more common to have to connect a presentation device to a computer while preparing a presentation, causing the presentation device and usually a computer mouse to coexist in a same space at the same time that the wiring of the two devices can be messy and troublesome.
There are already several cursor-control devices integrating functions of the computer mouse and the presentation device. However, the control methods adopted thereby are still similar to those conventional computer mice and thus suffering the same limitations. As for the inertial/gravity mouse which are being aggressively studied recently, it use accelerometers for detecting acceleration of a movement while processing the detection to be used for controlling an object displayed on a computer monitor or other interactive devices, but it is still troubled by many technical difficulties and thus remains to be improved.
There are many researches relating to inertial mouse. One of which is an inertial mouse disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,874,941, entitled “Presentation Supporting Device”, as seen in FIG. 1. The presentation supporting device 2 shown in FIG. 1 is comprised of an X-axis accelerometer 1A, a Y-axis accelerometer 1B and a pair of signal processors 10A and 10B, by which acceleration variations caused by the inclination of the presentation supporting device 2 are detected by the two accelerometers 1A and 1B, causing the two to generate acceleration signals accordingly, and the two signal processors 10A and 10B process the acceleration signals to output cursor moving control signals for controlling movement of a cursor on a computer display screen. Operationally, when the inclination of the presentation supporting device 2 reaches a specific angle, the cursor controlled thereby is activated to move accordingly, and as soon as the cursor is moved to a desired position of the computer display screen, the movement of the cursor is stopped by returning the presentation supporting device 2 back to its initial position. However, as the presentation supporting device 2 is subjecting to the influence of gravity, it is often occurred that the cursor will continue to move even when the presentation supporting device 2 has already returned to its initial position. Thus, the presentation supporting device 2 fails to position the cursor accurately exactly when the supporting device 2 returns to its initial position and thus has unsatisfactory stability. It will take a user a great effort and time just to position the cursor accurately at his/her preferred position. Moreover, it is noted that the larger the inclination of the presentation supporting device 2 is, the larger the resulting accelerations will be, and thus the fast the cursor controlled thereby will be moving on the computer display screen so that the presentation supporting device 2 is difficult to control. In addition, the aforesaid presentation supporting device 2 does not equip with continuous page changing ability
Please refer to FIG. 2, which is a gravity mouse disclosed in TW Pat. Appl. No. 90221010. As the gravity mouse is being held to move and used for controlling the movement of a cursor displayed on a monitor of a personal computer (PC), its gravity sensor (i.e. G sensor) with potential energy measuring ability is enable to detect the potential energy variation of the gravity mouse caused by a movement of the same while transmitting a signal generated accordingly to its micro process unit (MCU) to be processed. As the MCU is able to detect the duration of the movement while receiving an acceleration signal caused by the movement, it can generate a control signal for controlling the cursor to move accordingly with respect to the duration and the acceleration. It is known that the movements of the cursor is determined by an integration operation performed based upon the detections of at least two accelerometers configuring in the gravity mouse at two perpendicular axes. Thus, as the movement is defined by integration which is prone to accumulate error, the positioning of the cursor might not be accurate. Moreover, the aforesaid gravity mouse does not equip with continuous page changing ability.
Therefore, it is in need of an inertial sensing input apparatus and method that not only is free from the shortcoming of prior arts, but also is equipped with continuous page changing ability.